Southern Poverty Law Center Hits ‘Russia Today’ Over 9/11

At the time of the last anniversary of Sept. 11, the channel published a four-part series on its website titled  “911 Reasons why 9/11 was (probably) an inside job.” The articles, by Russia Today commentator Robert Bridge, report uncritically on discredited notions about Sept. 11, including the possibility that a bomb inside the towers contributed to their collapse and that the CIA had advance knowledge of the attack. On March 10, one of Russia Today’s top stories was headlined “Americans continue to fight for 9/11 truth.” That story, about a Pennsylvania gathering of Sept. 11 truthers, reported incorrectly that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) listed Rudkowski’s We Are Change as a hate group along with the Ku Klux Klan. (In fact, this year the SPLC added We Are Change to its Patriot group listing, which is distinct from the hate group listing and includes hard-line antigovernment organizations that engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing.)

Russia Today’s focus on Sept. 11 “truth” hasn’t gone unnoticed. Douglas Murray, a British journalist and conservative political commentator, posted a withering blog item earlier this year about his “CrossTalk” appearance. “You can probably imagine,” he wrote on Feb. 15, “indeed can see, the look of astonishment that I and my fellow guest felt when the presenter declared to us, in the middle of a discussion about a totally different subject, that ‘the people that perpetrated 9/11 were not even fundamentalists at all.'”

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Top 10 Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories
By  Alexander Zaitchik, Southern Poverty Law Center, Alternet
In the weeks and months after the attacks, a subculture of “9/11 Truthism” emerged in which the attacks were seen as anything but a simple case of well-trained Al Qaeda operatives flying planes into landmark buildings. Instead, “truthers” argued that the World Trade Center buildings were destroyed by controlled demolitions, that a missile brought down United Airlines 93, and that a missile — and not an airliner at all — struck the Pentagon. Who was responsible? The U.S. government, of course.